"More than 50 percent of new servers being installed in 2009 will host virtualization" -- TheInfoPro

Hypervisors are running amok in the server room. A survey
published earlier this month by research firm TheInfoPro states that
50
percent of new servers installed this year will be virtualized,
and predicts the number will climb to 80 percent within three years.
One of the biggest growth areas for the technology, according to
researcher Steve Hilton at Yankee Group, is in small- and medium-size
businesses (SMBs), where as many as 69% of SMBs say they plan to
adopt server virtualization in the next 24 months.

While SMBs may have been a little slower on the virtual machine
uptake than their big-business counterparts in the past, they seem to
be making up for lost time. SMBs typically have a higher
concentration of virtualization in their IT operations according to
Greg Schultz, senior analyst for IT research and consulting company
StorageIO, and author of the recent book, “The Green and Virtual
Data Center.” Enterprise-class companies may tend to have a higher
count of virtualized servers overall, Schultz says, but “It’s
more likely in an SMB environment to see a higher level of
virtualization – in other words, 50, 60 70, maybe even up to 100
percent of their servers have been virtualized.”

In fact, if there’s such a thing as “over-virtualization,”
an SMB server room is where you’re most likely to find it. Schultz
says that in some cases, SMBs may actually be virtualizing to an
unhealthy degree. These smaller businesses sometimes find themselves
“going on a craze of trying to over-consolidate, and trying to
over-optimize, to the (detriment) of performance.”

When taken to such extremes, virtualization can actually be an
obstacle to increasing productivity, Schultz adds. He warns of a
“dark side,” where SMBs may realize too late that “in the quest
to try to drive up utilization and squeeze more and more out, the
performance is impacted, the response time and quality of service,
latency – things that can have an impact on the top line as well as
the bottom line of productivity, (and affect) what your users and
customers see.”

Schultz also cautions against the tendency among some smaller
firms, caught up in the fervor to virtualize, to forget about “the
basics, such as fault containment, fault isolation, basic high
availability, business continuity and disaster recovery.” There is
an inherent problem when small companies place too many virtual
machines on a single server, he said. “All of a sudden, that one
server has become a single point of failure,” he noted. “You’ve
put all your proverbial eggs in one basket.”

Schultz recommends using virtualization in moderation, always
making sure that there are redundancies in place to protect against
outages and failures. Doubling up on storage and network adapters can
also be important, he says. “If I have a bunch of servers, and by
themselves they’re not requiring a lot of network activity, or a
lot of storage or I/O activity, when I bunch them all together, their
aggregate processing needs are going to be greater. So they’re
going to need more CPU, more memory, more I/O capability.

“All those things need to be kept in perspective,” Schultz
says, “such that in the quest to optimize the environment, you
don’t inadvertently introduce bottlenecks or instability.”

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